IJCAI'97 Workshop on

Abduction and Induction in AI

Nagoya, 24 August, 1997

Abduction and induction have been recognized as important forms of
reasoning with incomplete information that are appropriate for many
problems in Artificial Intelligence. Abduction is generally understood
as reasoning from effects to causes or explanations, and induction (or
inductive generalisation) as inferring general rules from specific data.
In Artificial Intelligence, a typical application of abduction is
diagnosis, and a typical application of induction is learning from
examples.

In spite of their importance in AI, our current understanding of the
logical inference operations underlying abduction and induction is
incomplete and incoherent. For instance, both abduction and induction are
often perceived as embodying a form of "reversed" deduction: together with
the background knowledge, the hypothesis should entail a given observation
or set of observations. This view is incomplete, since in many cases
abductive or inductive hypotheses do not entail the observations. It is
also incoherent, in that it does not recognise the fundamental differences
between abduction and induction.

This workshop is intended to improve our understanding of the inference
operations underlying abductive and inductive reasoning, and the relation
between the two. Particular emphasis will be given to the study of these
forms of inference in the context of Artificial Intelligence.

This workshop is the second of its kind, the first one being organised
at ECAI'96 in Budapest. The previous workshop brought together people
from different disciplines, and identified some of the main general
issues (see the workshop report at
http://machtig.kub.nl:2080/ECAI96/report.html).
The aim of this second workshop is to address the issue of
abduction and induction in the context of practical AI problems. The
following questions summarise the workshop's focus:

What (if anything) distinguishes/characterizes each form of reasoning
and their corresponding computational models?

How can we characterize different prototypical AI tasks for which
it is appropriate to use one of these two forms of reasoning?

How can Abduction and Induction be integrated in the context of
Artificial Intelligence problems? For example,

It is the organizers' intention to provoke a genuine workshop atmosphere. In
order to achieve this we solicit position papers rather than full technical
papers. Furthermore, the presentations and discussions at the workshop will be
limited to a few key issues.

Position papers

By a position paper we mean a short paper (2-4 pages) that is specifically
written for the purposes of this workshop. It may contain a brief summary of
one's own research programme and results, but it should address at least one
general topic of the workshop and identify general issues related to or arising
from this work. Authors are encouraged to indicate general problems that they
believe need to be addressed and therefore should be amongst the topics of
discussion at the workshop. Submission of a position paper would normally be
required for participation in the workshop. The number of participants will be
limited to max. 30.

Your position paper should reach the Program Committee by March 10, 1997.
Email submissions are encouraged (PostScript, HTML, ASCII, or LaTeX;
for other formats see the workshop's
WWW pages).
Submissions should be sent to the following address:

Submitted papers will be evaluated by the Program Committee. Authors of
accepted papers may expand these to a maximum of 8 pages. These papers as
well as a list of discussion topics arising from them will be available
on-line before the workshop.

Workshop format

The workshop itself will consist of presentations and moderated discussions. The
presentations are intended to put the issues under discussion into context.
The speakers will be selected among the authors of accepted papers by the
Program Committee. In addition, there will be one or two invited
speaker(s).
The discussions will each address one of the main topics of the workshop.
The topics for discussion will be preselected by the Program Committee
according to the submitted papers, but participants will be encouraged to
propose other topics at the workshop.

Please note that in order to participate in this workshop you have to
register for IJCAI'97!